How much longer will the middle class politely tolerate its own
destruction?
A middle class that
outnumbers the combined poor and aristocracy is a relatively new phenomenon,
dating back to around 1900. The rise of the middle class was the result of
Industrial Revolution capitalism. It has been one of the most significant and
epochal developments in history, yet the intellectual reaction for the most
part has been to either ignore it or treat it with disdain. Now the project to
destroy the middle class is well under way, with unpredictable and
uncontrollable consequences that promise to be just as epochal as its creation.
Intellectual
condescension towards the middle class is so common it’s a cliché. What’s rare
are attempts to go back in history and see things through the perspectives of
that despised group and its progenitors, the poor.
In 1800,
virtually everyone was poor, living under conditions of deprivation and
grinding poverty. Even being wealthy was no picnic; present-day poverty-line
Americans live better. Life expectancy was an estimated twenty-nine years.
Farming, the occupation of most, was dangerous, backbreaking labor from dawn to
dusk. Most of those so engaged eked out a tenuous subsistence. There was no
electricity, no running water, primitive sanitation and health care, and none
of the machinery, gadgets, and appliances we take for granted. Only a few
wealthy poets who didn’t have to wrest a living from nature waxed euphoric
about its “joys.”
As the
nineteenth century progressed, primitive factories, mostly in cities, began
producing goods of better quality, in more quantity, and at lower cost than had
been possible by artisans handcrafting their wares. No doubt conditions in
those factories were abysmal—long hours, pittance pay, child labor, dangerous
and filthy conditions, and horrible accidents and injuries. All that has been
well-chronicled and dramatized, but an important point gets overlooked. Bad as they were, the factories
were a better option for those who worked in them than the farms from whence
many of them came, or they would have stayed there.
Capitalism requires
capital, and early industrialization provided profits to capitalize: more
factories, further innovation, new inventions and industries, and eventually
the astonishing burst of dynamic energy that became the Industrial Revolution.
Each new generation of mines, factories, ships, trains, farms and other
productive assets became less labor-intensive, produced higher average real
wages, had lower percentages of child labor, and were less dangerous than their
predecessors. Again, by present day standards most working conditions were
still abysmal, but less so than what had preceded them. That was the relevant
consideration for the millions of people who worked in Dickensian
conditions: it was their best option, and better than anything they had
previously known.
The nineteenth
century produced more technological and scientific innovation that all the
centuries before it combined. Societies don’t go from poor to rich overnight.
However, real world conditions―opportunity, income, wealth, health, and overall
quality of life―steadily improved. By 1900, life expectancy in the US was 46
years for males and 48 years for females, an unprecedented one-century
increase.
Those who throw
rocks at the Industrial Revolution, the period when America approached laissez
faire capitalism, have to minimize or ignore one simple fact. Millions of people braved the
dangers of travel, the uncertainties of life in a new land, the difficulties of
learning a new language, the prejudice and hostility they knew they would
encounter, the daunting challenges of starting at the bottom, and the absence
of government giveaways and freely chose to immigrate to the United States.
Sometimes the payoff
was huge. Andrew Carnegie really did get off the boat with eleven cents in his
pocket. Cyrus McCormack, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and
other success stories came from impoverished or modest backgrounds and made
multimillion dollar fortunes. The self-made businessman became the American
archetype, fueling countless aspirations.
The emergent middle class was a cohesive force for
political stability. The immigrants passed their memories of what they had escaped
to their children and grandchildren. They embraced the reality and the promise
of America based on their own fruitful experience. Life was good and would get
even better, why rock the boat? Few noticed the thunderhead on the horizon.
That thunderhead was
hate, directed not at America’s flaws and weaknesses, but at its virtues and
strengths. The
sacrifice, hard work, thrift, and ingenuity that had lifted millions from
poverty was condemned as selfishness, blind ambition, and greed. The middle
class that didn’t exist a century ago was materialistic, anti-intellectual, and
spiritually impoverished. The unprecedented wealth America was producing was
wrong because it was unequally distributed, or the most philanthropic and
charitable people in history weren’t giving enough away.
You can guess where the hostility came from: the
intellectuals who found what they peddled commanded little attention or
respect, and would-be rulers in a nation with little desire to be ruled. The
desire for autonomy, to be left alone, to be free to make one’s own decisions
and live one’s own life, are the benchmarks of well-adjusted normalcy. The
desires to tell or force other people what to do are the opposite, wellsprings
of hate which are, depending on their intensity and quality, neurotic,
sociopathic, or psychopathic.
That the middle
class is now fighting for its life reflects two intellectual failures. In the late 1800s and
early 1900s, the intellectuals, political class, and many of the tycoons were
pressing for expanded government, the income tax, central banking, and American
interventionism and imperialism. The truisms that any expansion of the
government’s power and resources would only reduce the people’s liberty and be
funded with money stolen from them was overwhelmed by what’s become the
standard propaganda: coercion is necessary to address some risk, danger, or
“unacceptable” condition. There were no prominent voices connecting the
prevalent peace, prosperity, and optimism with the era’s unprecedented personal
freedom, nor arguing their essential inseparability.
The other
failure: most “average” Americans simply couldn’t comprehend or even conceive
of the hatred directed against them. Statism, whatever its variations, is never
about doing something for people, it’s about doing something to them. Even now, with
virulent vitriol and hatred on full display, much of it is minimized or
rationalized by people who should know better. The corruption of the “middle-grounders”
may run deeper than the statists and the collectivists, who at least no longer
try to hide their agenda and acknowledge that freedom cannot coexist with the
unlimited governmental power they covet.
When somebody claims that your life is their property,
they’re telling you that they have the right to do with it what they will,
which includes killing you. All manner of statist belladonna reached full
florescence in the twentieth century—socialism, communism, nazism, fascism,
welfare statism, cronyism, kleptocracy, kakistocracy—and the murder, genocide,
and war have been orders of magnitude greater than anything that preceded it.
You shall know
them by their works. The thing that statism does best to people is kill them;
the record is clear and unmistakable. Anyone now promoting more of the same is
simply evil. Only unmitigated hatred accounts for the particular antipathy
directed towards the middle class: their values, their prosperity, and their
predominate race (white) and religion (Christianity).
The middle class being a relatively new phenomenon,
nobody can say what the consequences of the all-out war against it will be. It
is the bedrock of modern economies and its destruction will take out most of
the developed world’s productive capacity and consumer markets. That doesn’t seem to
bother the statists. How they plan to free themselves from the economies that
sustain them is a question they ignore. It calls to mind Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shruggedobservation: the deaths
they desire the most are their own. That has to be the true definition of
insanity. Truer even than Einstein’s: repeatedly doing the same thing and
expecting a different result.
The notion that our
rulers are insane has slipped loose from the alternative media where it was
once confined. Certainly
US foreign policy meets Einstein’s definition: repeated regime changes in the
name of democracy promotion that promote only carnage and chaos, endlessly
inconclusive interventions, war profiteering, terrorism, and intense hatred of
the American people and its government around the world. Donald Trump
questioned those repeated failures and that provided his margin of victory in
2016.
To this day
nobody can explain the logic behind the bailouts during the last financial
crisis and what ensued, the world’s central banks monetizing massive government
debt and pushing interest rates below zero. The high and mighty pretend this is
all normal, but for normal people buying a bond with a guaranteed loss is
insane. Microscopic rates force them, against their better judgment, into a
stock market that’s crashed twice since the turn of the century, decimating
their savings, and now sits at historically sky-high valuations. Here is the
“investment landscape” you’re supposed to embrace: lose money or put it on the
pass line and hope the Wall Street roll of the dice doesn’t once again come up
craps.
Keep spending money
you don’t have and inevitably you’ll go broke. Keep making promises you can’t fulfill and
inevitably you’ll break them. There are hundreds of trillions of dollars worth
of claims on the future out there that have no chance of ever being redeemed,
yet the pile continues to grow. The mathematical outcome is as straightforward
and devastating as playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded.
Obamacare is the
latest insane gift from the government that keeps on giving. It’s an obvious
failure, but it’s a foaming-at-the mouth, murderous pit bull that from some
deranged concept of mercy or an appalling lack of fortitude nobody will put out
of its misery. Medical care stands in a long line of industries that
malevolence masked as good intentions has destroyed.
As the middle class watches the America it once knew and
cherished collapse, and comes to understand why, it realizes its head is on the
chopping block.
A bright middle-schooler can see that the Green New Deal will bring the economy
to a shuddering stop and plunge many who have managed to escape so far into
poverty. Yet the Democrats’ leading lights rush to praise the imaginary
raiment of would-be empress Ocasio-Cortez.
The middle class
has always aspired to better things—the American dream. Talk of 70 percent or
higher tax rates and wealth taxes capitalizes on hatred of the rich, it’s open
season. Why work and sacrifice to get rich if the government gets it all? Take
away middle class dreams and you may well be taking away the last thing that
keeps them paying their taxes, observing the law, supporting the troops and
police, in short, everything that from the vantage point of the ruling class,
“keeps them in line.”
What began as a gentle squeeze a century ago has become
python-like constriction. Government has drained economic vitality and shuttered
opportunity as the once politically stable, prosperous, and optimistic middle
class dwindles. A few still reach the upper echelon, but most are consigned to
creeping poverty, blunting the economic consequences with credit and the
personal consequences with cannabis, alcohol, opioids, pornography, and
promiscuity. It’s only going to get worse as debt grows, massive unfunded
medical and pension liabilities come due, taxes rise, economies shrink, and
promises are broken.
The ruling class has
backed the middle class into a corner. Shoving them into poverty and vanquishing their dreams amounts
to an unprecedented and dangerous experiment. Aristocratic arrogance,
condescension, exclusivity, and isolation add to the combustibility. Yet they
remain steadfastly oblivious to the rising anger and the risks. They don’t even
recognize the danger of billing the governments they control (or the global one
they want to create) as the solution to all problems. Who’s going to get the
blame when things fall apart?
The potentates
may find their nuclear arsenals and well-armed militaries and police forces
comforting. However, their experiment confronts unanswered questions. What if a
substantial portion of the population has taken to the streets and far
outnumbers the praetorians? What if praetorian sentiment is with the protestors
and insurrectionists? Are the rulers really prepared to use tanks, heavy
artillery, bombs, and even nuclear weapons on their own population? Will the
people charged with pressing those buttons actually press them?
For America’s ruling class failing
policies, looming insolvency, rising awareness via the alternative media, their
own hypocrisy and corruption, political polarization, and a well-armed populace
are a stairway to hell. What happens when the disaffected, many who will have
nothing to lose, try to reclaim their lives and liberty and upend the political
order that has roadblocked their pursuit of happiness?
Disaffection is a battalion, righteous
moral certainty an army. The latter has moved the world and will do so again.
Victor Hugo said that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Here’s an idea so powerful yet so simple it fits on a bumper sticker: Fight
for your life. It’s megatons of TNT, the fuze has
run, and the explosions have started. There’s no way to predict or control the
consequences. The only certainty is that anyone who thinks they can do so will
be proven disastrously wrong.